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THE RED CRITIQUE |
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Revolution
as Seduction, Pedagogy as Therapy, and the Subject is Always
"Me"
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One "Almost
Always Deceived: Revolutionary Praxis & Reinventions of Need,"
the Third Annual Conference of the Marxist Reading Group at the University
of Florida (March 29-31, 2001), billed itself as a "Marxist"
conference—a gathering for discussion and debates over the current
situation of radical thinking in the U.S. It turned out to be a very
interesting event to attend but not for the reasons advertised: there was
no debate (only testimonials), no critique (only therapy), and nothing
even remotely Marxist about any of these. It was a spectacle: a
combination of flea market, boutique and e-auction of some of the recent
as well as familiar textwares of the bourgeois left. The
"conference" was an occasion of confirmation and affirmation
that the best stand for the left now is standlessness; the best strategy
"persuasion" and "seduction"; and the most effective
pedagogy nurturing, connecting, and accommodating. But these are the
details, and details never tell the total story. We are interested in the
total. Here, therefore, we first outline the legitimating theoretical
frame of oscillations, standlessness, and seduction that were in play at
Florida and then engage the "ideas" put forth by the two keynote
speakers (Peter McLaren and Rosemary Hennessy). Two The
oscillations, standlessness, and opportunism of the left now is justified
by appeal to some very right-wing theories that ultimately derive from
Nietzsche, Heidegger and their latter-day students such as Derrida, Nancy,
and deMan. This standlessness is in large part the effect of the
textualization of the inside/outside relations as the allegory of all
"binaries" and the consequent deconstruction of
"opposition" and its "dialectics." The
problematics of "inside/outside" are, of course, constitutive of
some of the important issues in contemporary theory. The most recent
contestations over the inside/outside, which have a long history in
Western philosophy, begin with the rise of so-called
"deconstruction" and poststructuralism in general. As part of
deconstructing all binaries, the opposition of inside/outside was
subjected to several sustained readings by Derrida (Of Grammatology,
Dissemination, Writing and Difference, Margins of
Philosophy) as well as deMan (Allegories of Reading, Aesthetic
Ideology,…) and such other commentators as J. Hillis Miller, Barbara
Johnson and Samuel Weber. The effect of these textualizations has been to
inscribe the outside in the inside/the inside in the outside, and thus to
establish, in the place of distinct zones of meaning clarified through
critique-al theoretical debate, a (Heideggerian) zone of in-between-ness
into which all meanings are placed, thereby becoming indeterminate,
post-oppositional entities—playful "hybridities" which are
presumably beyond binaries. This
double-inscription, like all double-sessions in post-theory, has been
represented as "progressive" and politically enabling. Yet
double-reading is a troping device deployed, for example, in
"progressive" anti-racist readings to render "black"
and "white" supplemental and thereby produce an indeterminate
and unknowable hybridity beyond both (for example, Homi Bhabha's The
Location of Culture or Gayatri Spivak's A Critique of
Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present;
Butler-Laclau-Zizek's Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary
Dialogues on the Left). Similarly deployed in queer theory,
nation-studies, and other post-studies, double-reading reduces concepts to
puncepts whose undecidability blocks the necessary reliable knowledge for
revolution. To give another example, in his essay on "Class" (Critical
Terms for Literary Study, 2nd edition), Daniel T. O'Hara
"doubles" "class," turning the concept of class into
an orphan trope and then adopting it so that it can be used
"strategically, pragmatically, with a certain ironic, even (self-)parodic
lightness" (418). Double-reading is a device deployed to
simultaneously textualize and dematerialize—to sever at the level of the
conceptual the possibility of connecting "inside" to
"outside." In-between-ness,
then, is the logic of the "double" that serves, especially
during times of heightened crisis, to legitimize liberal political
vacillation, class opportunism, and stand-less-ness as
"progressive." However, no theory can claim progressiveness
without taking a decisive stand—not only on culture, but also on the
fundamental issues that shape cultural practices. What the deconstruction
of inside/outside provides is not a decisive stance, but an
epistemological alibi for political oscillation—and thus (under the
guise of philosophical self-reflexivity and a sophisticated
"up-to-date"-ness) the resulting "in-between-nesses"
provides a politics comforting to the ruling class. The
binary inside/outside is the effect of the fundamental binary of class:
the bourgeois and the proletarian. Simply to textualize
inside/outside—that is, to deconstruct them—is an idealist act. In
order to put an end to inside/outside and all other social binaries
(man/woman; straight/queer; rich/poor; white/black;…) we argue that
class should be overthrown and that, in order to do so at this stage of
historical struggle, the gap between binaries should be heightened and
their underlying contradictions brought to a crisis, not simply
textualized and made invisible. Instead
of bringing the inside/outside to a crisis by sustained reexamination of a
set of related issues that heighten their crisis, the University of
Florida's Marxist Reading Group conference tried to hide the crisis with
tales of seduction and persuasion. Three The
first "keynote speaker" of the conference was Peter McLaren,
whose entire talk revolved around his project of "supplementing"
Marxism with a theory of the "subject" and thus eventually
rewriting it as "marxism." McLaren performed the very notion of
"supplementation." We say performed because in his talk there
was no serious conceptual discussion—what was on display was instead a
rhetoric of seduction which writes his relation with the audience not as
one of political or intellectual engagement but as a relation of desire.
Political and intellectual relations both require concepts and, if
concepts are, as he implied in his reading of Marx, tropes, then the only
way that one can relate to the other is (as Baudrillard has taught the
left) by "seduction." Seduction is, to use Baudrillard's own
terms, the simulation of the spontaneous and on the Western left nothing
has more attraction than the spontaneous—as in fact the
"second" keynote speaker (Rosemary Hennessy) made quite clear. Instead
of "critique" aimed at producing knowledge for socialist praxis
what McLaren's performance consisted of was thus tales of
"radical" activism, sutured to conceptual revisions of Orthodox
Marxism. Yet his story of the Zapatistas for example, like his other
stories, was a revisionist tale, that left out how [s]even
years after launching a brief armed confrontation with the Mexican army
that left 200 dead in the southern state of Chiapas, the Zapatista
guerrilla movement has taken the well-trodden path of transforming itself
into a political instrument of Mexico's ruling establishment (World
Socialist Web Site, April 11, 2001). McLaren
moved opportunistically between the commonsensical notion of
supplement—adding and completing; and the deconstructive one—adding to
show the strange cohabitation of the opposites that leads to the marking
of absence in the seeming presence and plenitude of such Marxist concepts
as class, exploitation, revolution, labor theory of value and the subject
of history-as-proletariat. For
example, instead of the "labor theory of value" (which sharply
poses the binary of class exploitation), McLaren installed the "value
theory of labor" which blurs the class binary by appeal to a
generalized and inclusive (transclass) "domination"; in place of
"vanguard party" McLaren reiterated the banalities of
"cross-class alliances." Not content with contemporary forms of
revisionism, McLaren further turned to an earlier generation of
revisionists—Raya Dunayevskaya [a collaborator of CLR James and part of
the group the "Johnson Forest Tendency"]—in order to argue for
the transformative power not of labor but of (Hegelian) "absolute
negativity" and thus to supplement "revolution" with the
"creative" power of the "imagination." In
fact, McLaren's whole address was a staging of this vacuous idealism that
now passes as "activism" among the U.S. left and a recycling of
what Marx and Engels long ago critiqued as "utopian socialism":
the view that the struggle for socialism is a question of capturing the
"imagination" and thus that the goal of Marxism is seducing the
listeners into believing that socialism is necessary. Hence McLaren's
rhetorical extravagances (which substituted the language of
"outrage" for scientific knowledge and appealed to "human
resistance" as the basis for "change") and his performative
dematerialization of Marxism. Against what he termed "rigid and
dogmatic" Marxism, what he thus placed on display was
Marxism-as-cultural-radicalism which (despite McLaren's own professed
opposition to the neoliberal marketization-of-everything) is a device of
the market to turn scientific socialism into a commodified and generic
hybrid "leftism" (which can be comfort-ably worn along with the
T-shirts of Ché and Lenin which are the hot new urban-shopper items and,
like the music of bands such as Rage Against the Machine and International
Noise Conspiracy, are part of the highly profitable manufacturing of a
"radical" cultural identity for First World youth). It was no
surprise then that deployed against our "red collectivity" of
Orthodox Marxist critique at the conference was thus a staging of
"rhetorical collectivity" by McLaren and the audience who (like
him) gave their testimonies of engagement and self-identified as
"soldiers" in the "army of commandante McLaren." McLaren's
winning point with the audience of course was the underlying claim of his
talk: that Orthodox Marxism does not have a theory of the subject. This
claim is, of course, a trivialization of the Marxist theory of the
subject. But, what is necessary to point out here is not that McLaren
repeats what is on the left network but (despite his professed love of
Hegel) his total absence of self-reflexivity: he did not even recognize
that no theory is void of a theory of the subject; the theoretical issue
is how any theory accounts for the subject. Bourgeois
left theory accounts for the subject as a pre-given AFFECT (hence its
emphasis on the "emotions," "desires,"
"feelings," "passions"); on the contrary, Orthodox
Marxism theorizes it as an EFFECT of social relations of production
(private property relations) and the "emotions,"
"desires," "feelings," "passions," are
explainable starting from the "base" of surplus labor. In other
words, the issue is not that Orthodox Marxism has no theory of the subject
but that the clerks of the ruling class simply do not like the theory of
the subject in Orthodox Marxism. If they do not like something, it seems
that thing does not exist! Which is, of course, itself symptomatic of why
the subject looms so large on the "theoretical" horizon of
contemporary left. The subject is always "me." This
"supplementing" of Orthodox Marxism—which was the object not
only of McLaren's talk, but was also repeated in several of the other
conference papers—is, it is necessary to reiterate, useful to the
bourgeoisie because in the theorization of whatever the specific site
(sexuality, race, affect, pedagogy, queerity,…), the
"supplement" works to produce a hybrid of Marxism by mixing it
with the ruling class view whose sole goal is to strengthen the social
relations of property. This then is the dilemma of the Western left: how
to suture the regime of private property to a theory of equality and, in
enacting this suturing, this left has provided unending entertainment for
even the mildly critique-al observer. It
was one such entertaining scene when in a paper "On the Ideology of
Consumer Sovereignty & the Production of Needs" Dennis Badeen
first presented a detailed summary of a materialist theory of need based
on Marx's theorization of the primacy of production and as a critique of
the sovereignty of the consumer in neo-classical economic theory, but then
in the second part of his paper in his discussion of "agency,"
argued for the need to "supplement" Marx with Freud (via Marcuse)
and posited the basis of "agency" in "instinctual
energies" (i.e. the regime of spontaneous "desire"). By
"agent" he put forth not so much an "autonomous"
subject (although that is what he thought he was defending) but a
"propertied" subject who, because he was propertied, had certain
"rights" (Marx, "The Jewish Question"). In other
words, he, like McLaren, was deploying the "subject" to defend
and legitimate capitalist relations of property. The ownership, in the
post-tradition of Lacan, Deleuze-Guattari, however, was relayed as desire
and seduction: desire = desire-to-have. The
"false consciousness" that framed these and other papers of the
conference made the participants refuse to recognize how objective class
interest shapes the totality and thus deny
the logic of
"causation" (including as the shaping force of
"revolution"): The unsurpassable objective fact that the wealth
of the few is caused by the poverty of the many and that this fundamental
economic relation systematically shapes the political, the social, the
cultural. Instead of a sustained unpacking of the objective causes, the
left bourgeois "scholar" always thus ultimately focuses on the
realm of "effects." In fact the entire bourgeois scholarship is
nothing but annotations and subscriptions of "effects" (always
complicated by further effects—"mediations,"
"relays" and "detours") that will never allow a final
confrontation with the cause. This is the logic of "false
consciousness." Historical
materialist analysis, on the contrary, has always focused on
"cause" and has sought the cause in objective relations of
property—the class antagonism that is "the history of all hitherto
existing society" (Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist
Party). It demystifies how the effects become (in history and as a
result of class struggle) effects. One of the recurring issues in the exchanges in the conference was whether in fact the necessary theory for social emancipation is one which produces knowledge of materialist causality and carries through this emphasis into its discussion of the "political"—or whether it (by various mediations) displaces it (and thus finally cuts off the political from the economic). What was ultimately at stake, of course, in the various presentations—whether they appealed to Adorno, Marcuse, Jameson, Gramsci, Dunayevskaya or…—was just this logic of mixing post-causality with objectivity in order to produce a left theory that legitimated private property while at the same time lamenting wage-labor and its inequality. This was a scene to watch: entertainment unseen anywhere in part because the participants were too un-self-reflexive to watch themselves entertaining themselves.
In
the midst of the entertainment that the conference had become, it became
the public consensus that the test of the real effectivity of Marxist
theory is its "persuasiveness." This theme was picked up and
elaborated in the speech by the second "keynote
speaker"—Rosemary Hennessy. Again
what was at issue in Hennessy's address was not only WHAT she actually
said: her talk, like her published texts—was in fact a hybrid soup of
clichés of left-liberal "activist" sentimentalities (which
shore up the actual "other" practices of
global-capitalism-with-a-human-face--neighborhood community activism,
NGO-ism, "alternative development,"…all of which help to keep
capitalism going as a system by reforming it in its localities) and (mis)appropriation
of the central concepts of Orthodox Marxism (class consciousness, class
struggle, needs,…). Rather, what was meant to be equally
"instructive" to the main audience of
bourgeois-activists-in-training was HOW she engaged (attempted to manage)
the class critiques of the Marxist-Leninists in the audience. Hennessy's
tactic to address the Orthodox Marxist position was to "stage"
an affective pedagogy (of persuasive personalism). Thus after her talk,
she came out from behind the podium and approached the side of the room on
which a group of Marxist-Leninists was seated and immediately addressed
the issues in terms of the theorizations through which this group had
engaged both the conference and the issues put forth at the conference. In
an exemplary corporate managerial mode aimed at reconciling the sharp
class antagonisms in theory which had surfaced at the conference, she then
deployed the logic of "on the one hand," "on the other
hand" (which is the privileged rhetorical mode of all corporate
management) to localize and contain the conflicts. Thus, as Hennessy said,
on the one hand the Orthodox Marxism of the Red Collective had brought an
important intervention to the conference which involved placing the
serious issues in the foreground—but, on the other hand, her difference
with Marxist-Leninists was at the site of "pedagogy." The
"differences" in short, were not a result of the absolute
difference between Orthodox Marxism and the new marxist flexodoxy—that
is, a difference in "principle"—but rather it was all about
the "how" since, in actuality, according to her, "we"
all "shared" the same "principles." In
other words, the difference at stake (in Hennessy's flexodoxy, in
McLaren's, to take only the most prominent examples) was in fact merely a
difference of "strategy" regarding what would be more
"persuasive" to others who did not share "our" views.
One should keep in mind that for the bourgeois left—after textualizing
concepts/principles—all that is left is "strategy." The
"problem" with the Marxist-Leninists in the conference was that
their theory was "lacking" because it did not "renarrate"
the issues in such ways as to interpellate the (bourgeois) listeners.
Instead of (like good flexodoxes) interpellating them, we were thus in
fact "alienating" them. And what such "alienation"
testified to was the "lack" of an effective theory of
"affect" and thus ultimately of the ineffectivity of the praxis
of the collective. We
leave aside here that part of what was at stake in this performance was a
narrative of the "me" to justify her historical practices of
class oscillation. That it was in this context that Hennessy inserted a
nostalgic and self-validating narrative—similar to the banal stories of
other "lapsed" leftists—of her rejection of revolutionary
collective praxis: that she had once belonged to a revolutionary Marxist
collective but that the activities of the collective had put them into
such confrontation with the bourgeois world that it had caused a personal
"crisis" for Hennessy and, because the collective did not have a
theory of "affective" response to manage the crisis, she had
left the collective. What made such banal narratives more embarrassing in
a Marxist or even Marxian conference was the complete lack of basic
knowledge of the revolutionary positions that McLaren and Hennessy—in a
quick act of self-recovery—identified with. Hennessy for example,
announced in public that Lenin has taught us that one cannot bring
"class consciousness" from the "outside" (she called
it "top" to emphasize her own non-hierarchical views)—but is a
theoretician of class consciousness "from below"! What
Hennessy was calling the practice of "re-narration"—the
practice that is in her view "the same as" the practice of
Orthodox Marxist "ideology critique"—actually functioned in
her pedagogy as a re-centering, re-confirming device. To give an example:
while she claimed to be "all for" re-narration, yet she was in
practice (that is, in reality, and not in the "imaginary") NOT
"re-narrating" but re-confirming the anti-communist views
that Orthodox Marxism is "totalitarian," "monolithic,"
"dogmatic,"…and that what is needed now is thus a
"popular" (populist) "marxism-from-below"—which is a
rehash of the ideological staple of the New Left's revisions of
Marxism-Leninism into a reformist, spontaneist leftism which doesn't
seriously antagonize the bourgeoisie. In short, what is needed is a "leftism"
"popular" with the ruling class. When
her views were contested by audience members and it was suggested that it
is exactly this practice of the pragmatic and "popular"
opportunistic leftism which is what has allowed Hennessy and other
leftists to have book deals with such corporate presses as
Routledge/Verso/Blackwell and have their ideas widely disseminated while
those of Orthodox Marxism are routinely suppressed in all sites by the
monopoly presses and their agents in the knowledge and culture
industry—at this juncture, Hennessy pulled out the alibis of left
deniability: She did not make any money from Routledge, in fact—she
hinted—she had to pay them! They could not sell her books, etc., etc. In
other words, ultimately of course, she admitted: "Yes, it's an
empirical fact that I am published by Routledge, BUT...it is not
self-evident what that means!" Indeterminacy: the last refuge of the
left-opportunists: Yes, I did it, but it is not clear what my practices
mean so don't critique me for doing it! The
University of Florida's Marxist Reading Group Conference was no Marxist or
marxist or even Marxian conference. It
was a gathering of Young Libertarians. THE
RED CRITIQUE 1(Spring 2001) |